In what has surprised me greatly, nobody has submitted anything to us regarding this day in the history of computing. Sure, memories of her may not be fond, and with the magical unicorn power of hindsight you'd rather forget you ever dated her so intensely, but she served a purpose. She led a revolution that changed the world forever, and while you may have hoped for a more charismatic leader, I think it's unfair not to honour the fact that she turned 15 today.

Those days Windows (and arguably these days too) was technically far superior to Mac OS.

Ok, if there is a lot of things that were already available to a Mac user; the "inners" in Windows were incredibly good architected and far from Mac OS: Windows 95 was a truly preemptive
multitasking OS; the Win32 API is still the same API used today and though a lot of things were added, you probably are still able to run your first Win95 apps in your Windows 7: Letting the OS be able to do that requires a lot of good engineering.

Utilizing DOS for compatibility reasons is a far cry from being DOS based.

It used DOS for a lot more than that. And running on top of the DOS-environment gave many architectural limitations. Windows95 was a 32-bit DOS-application and that's all. Architectural there was no difference compared with DOS 6.22+WfW3.11. Exit Windows and you would be sent back to COMMAND:COM - without having to reboot.

Lets see... Win95 had it's own driver model, it's own memory system, it's own network stack, file system drivers, it's own hardware configuration system, it bypassed the BIOS for disk access (unlike DOS), had a thread scheduler, had it's own event and interrupt handlers, created and managed it's own virtual machines (used for running DOS apps)

Actually it doesn't. Part of the memory management is handled by DOS. There is no archictectural difference between running WfW-3.11 on DOS and Windows 4.0 on DOS (e.g. Windows95).

That is absolute bogus. I never heard such nonsense.

Just read the architectural documentation regarding Windows 95. If, after reading this, you still believe "there is no archictectural difference between running WfW-3.11 on DOS and Windows 4.0 on DOS (e.g. Windows95)", then you simply don't know what you just read.

That is the craziest not true thing in your comment. Not even close to being true. Maybe in the sense that they both can be loaded from dos. So they both rely on dos's memory model to load themselves. After boot win 95 is in full command, no dossiness present. But yes, it could not be loaded with out some dos-isms. Although Win Me didn't do that. It booted its own dang self without any dos ( It was this that caused me to not install it the day it was released. win9x crapped out so much I often needed to fix its boot process).

But really the way you replied to Thom was just wrong. As best as I can tell, you were trying to make a very specific point about the windows/dos relationship, but did so with very generic wording and expected everyone to read your mind. When, predictably, they failed to read your mind, you go crazy nuts on them for not being able to.

In general, if you are going to make a technical, subtle argument do not be surprised if no one understands you if you use very generic language.

There is no Win95 without DOS7. Win98 is Windows 4.1 running on top of DOS7.1.

The main difference between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows95 is that the first is Windows 4.0 running on NT, and the latter is Windows 4.0 running on MS-DOS 7.0.

The DOS-based Win9x suffered from several bugs inherited from the DOS-environment. Particularly the lack of GDI-resources led to unavoidable crash (I just love KERNEL32.EXE and it's blue "welcome screen"). Try opening and closing several windows, recording a short movie clip or using ICQ and see what happens. 30 minutes and it crashes - hard.

Windows NT 4.0 and Windows95 are both Windows-systems. They are simply using different kernels.

Neither of which is DOS...

You are persistent, Ill give you that... I read all of your posts on this subject, and while there is a glimmer of truth in what you say, you are ignoring a rather important fact.

Windows 95/98/ME all essentially piggy-backed on DOS to a certain degree, there is no denying that. But they did so on purpose - the few hooks into DOS that were left were all intentional. All of what you are saying is true to a degree, but you need to look at WHY they retained DOS.

The fact is that if MS did not need to support DOS applications that directly accessed hardware, and did not need to support real mode drivers, there is absolutely nothing that DOS is needed for anymore. The point is Windows 95 running protected mode Win32 applications does not need DOS at all, it chooses to hook into DOS for a few tasks because it was already there for other reasons - namely backwards compatibility.

As you pointed out, there were some problems with this (i.e. real mode apps would cause the scheduler to behave badly because it could not pre-empt them, the data structure mappings into DOS limited global resources, etc.) but for the most part it worked. The point is those problems were simply side-effects of backward compatibility - they served no purposed for Win32 apps.

Rewrite the boot loader, remove the support for real mode stuff and replace the handful of functionality that DOS was still used for and you would have Windows 95 sans DOS. It really wouldn't be hard to do at all - that is basically what Windows ME was. Granted it was a rather half-way job, DOS wasn't removed - more like hidden and neutered - but my point is the same.

The reason DOS was never completely removed was MS had already built something significantly better (NT) and there was no point wasting development on an inferior product destined to be retired.

Windows 95 was significantly more than just a GUI slapped on DOS. It had a preemptive scheduler (something Mac OS Classic never completely managed) used protected memory (something Mac OS never even tried), supported full 32-bit drivers for nearly all performance critical subsystems (Mac OS was still running much of its Toolbox in 6800 emulation mode from a ROM image - even in OS9), memory paging (that actually worked - unlike Mac OS), a full featured application API, etc. etc.

It may not have been the most elegant OS, but it was far from a DOS shell.

Windows 95 was much better than Mac OS 7, 8, or 9.
I remember having to manually increase the size of the heap for an app if I wanted to load a large document in Mac OS. The multitasking on OSX was cooperative, you had to deal with notions of hi memory vs low memory, had to implement "grow zones" (as there was no proper virtual memory).

And the message queue was horrible, as there were only a handful of message types, and you couldn't assign a message que to a particular element (like an HWND in Windows; though AppleEvents alleviated that somewhat), and in order to process a message/event, you had to do all these tests: What kind of event is it? OK, it's a mouse down event. Is it mouse down in a window? Yes. OK, is it a system or app window? App window. OK, is it in the grow box? Yes. OK, call TrackGrowWIndow (whatever the function was called). Or, if the mouse down were in a Menu, you had to explicitly call a menu handling function in order to get the menu to work. And on and on. Horrible.
Thankfully, Carbon Events did away with that, as did Cocoa. That message/event queue was my favorite thing about moving from classic Mac OS to OS X (I was a long time Mac programmer).

Oh yeah, in Classic Mac OS, you had to literally access system global variables to do certain things (like the qd global system variable for QuickDraw). And you had to explicitly access fields of system structures, as there was no propler get/set access functions to manipulate those values. Mac OS was extremely primitive.

Forget about Win95, Windows 3.0 was far superior, IMO, from a programming and API perspectivve. Windows 95 only increased Windows' superiority by adding separate address spaces and pre-emptive multitasking, and NT was even more superior (no matter how much Apple said NT stood for "Nice Try"). And Apple spent years trying to come up with a modern OS, failed, then decided to just put Carbon API on top of unix. Which I thought was too bad, because today we have only two types of OSes, unix-based and NT-based. I wish Apple had continued to have their own core, but they were unable to make a modern one on their own.

Forget about Win95, Windows 3.0 was far superior, IMO, from a programming and API perspectivve

I agree wholeheartedly. The way Windows worked - from user perspective - was however inferior. But that's a completely different perspective. And somewhat fixed in later versions of Windows (incl. Windows 4.x).

I don't think it would have been wise to keep the core of Mac OS Classic alive - it really was a evolutionary deadend. If anything they should've ditched it and relied on A/UX instead. They chose to replace Mac OS Classic with something even better than A/UX

I don't think Apple should've kept the Mac OS Classic core alive, but I wish they had created their own new core for a modern OS rather than just relying on Unix (via NeXTSTEP). I wish Copland had succeeded, in other words. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)

Or maybe I would've like Apple to go with BeOS rather than NeXTSTEP. Just anything so that they'd have a core other than Unix. It's not a big deal, it's just that I'd like there to be another widely used desktop OS core in use today besides NT and unix.

Those days Windows (and arguably these days too) was technically far superior to Mac OS.

Ok, if there is a lot of things that were already available to a Mac user; the "inners" in Windows were incredibly good architected and far from Mac OS: Windows 95 was a truly preemptive
multitasking OS; the Win32 API is still the same API used today and though a lot of things were added, you probably are still able to run your first Win95 apps in your Windows 7: Letting the OS be able to do that requires a lot of good engineering.

good grief... seems I need to continue to show my age here....
Windows 95 was only partially pre-emp. as soon as you ran a dos/win3 prg it wasn't.
Win32 was not there... that was an addon: "win32s" to give some compatibility to Windows NT - look it up, easy to find on google. Any true Win95 targeted program needed revising (16 to 32 bit api, plain chars to unicode api, ...) to get it compiled on NT.
Been there, done it, still have sources from those days to proof it.

It may have had better stuff under the hood, but there wasn't a single thing visible to the user that wasn't an amaturish rip off of something mac guys had had for years. and on top of everything else, it was terrible stability-wise (much worse then vista). I remember all the hype, and the excitement that I had when a friend bought a new machine that had it, and then shock and disappointment at what a total piece of garbage it was compared to the mac.

Yes, you are right... but Windows 95 was the first Windows of its class, so you can think of it as the 1.0 win32 windows.... and as with any 1.0, stability is always a problem (Vista is another example or KDE4.0).

Those days Windows (and arguably these days too) was technically far superior to Mac OS.

Ok, if there is a lot of things that were already available to a Mac user; the "inners" in Windows were incredibly good architected and far from Mac OS: Windows 95 was a truly preemptive
multitasking OS; the Win32 API is still the same API used today and though a lot of things were added, you probably are still able to run your first Win95 apps in your Windows 7: Letting the OS be able to do that requires a lot of good engineering.

I'll skip all the lol's and long lines of repeated hahaha's .. what you describe requires an insane amount of crud .. one layered on top of the other.. Multitasking has improved alot, and still, a giant joke in any version of Windows.. search google for multitasking benchmarks against linux and you'll see windows being trounced by a factor 7 on the same hardware.. And windows 95 brought one of the worst Microsoft inventions ever, still ruining their os' performance and longevity to this day.. the Registry!
Who the hell ever heard of an OS aging? ..destroying itself over time.. impressive engineering indeed!

So, do you think the X Window System is a beautiful piece of modern engineering?

And what about Linux drivers being broken after ABI changes? It occurs very very often.

Or do you think that Linux missing its own API is a good design? If I want to get some counter I need to go to the /proc virtual filesystem and get the information as plain text, parse it and get what I need... Do not like the idea.

Did you find something more robust than NTFS? or something that can compete feature to feature with ActiveDirectory or Exchange?

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Windows fanboy, indeed I am a Unix user, but hating Windows just because it is a Microsoft creation does not make any sense at all and... yes... I also do not like the Windows registry in the same way I hate the configuration files inside hidden directories in my $HOME.

It was an era which won't be back again. Win95 sucks unix roxx. The good old songs of Weird AI and the
bunch of windows hater pictures. The kids grow up on xp/vista/7 doesn't even interested in touching
command prompt or reading about the history of windows. Guess this is what we leave behind food for
tough and see what they can make out of it but it doesn't seems better and more useful. Everyone is
going after their personal wealthiness and pushes crapware toolbars for windows cause this is the
new trend. Let's advertise and distribute crapware bundled with our software just to make more money.
Softwares get slower and fatter with bunch of useless functions. Programmers gets more and more lazy.
C coders are dieing out slowly and java coders take over just cause of the monnies. So let's develope
middleware for windows cause who cares about resource usage anymore. Most of java coders doesn't
even understand basic OS/networking/hw fundementals. But anyways until the shit is good for playing
world of warcraft/watching porn who cares.

Come on folks. It wasn't THAT bad. Most people were using Windows 3.11 for work groups when Win95 launched. It grew into Win98SE which actually was pretty good for it's time. Take a good hard look at the Mac OS of the time. It seems pretty pathetic by today's standards too.

1. In terms of UI it was a major improvement of Windows 3.1
2. It ran faster then Linux with Xwindows on low memory systems.
3. It had a slew of hardware drivers.
4. Compatibility with Old DOS and WIndows 3.1 Apps.
5. Mac OS had its own problems that the Mac Fan Boy will never mention unless comparing it with a new version of the same OS

It really took to 1999 for the standard PC to have enough horse power to support more enterprise level operating systems. Windows 95 and 98 were really a gateway OS. That gave the common folk access to multi-tasking and networking.

Win95 was a major let-down for me when I finally downgraded from OS/2 2.1 in 1998. So many things you couldn't do anymore. And next to no support for drag&drop.
I never got to run OS/2 Warp 3, and Warp 4 was never for sale in Denmark (in typical shops).

I was there in those days... at work I had a MacOS 7.1 later 7.5 on which I did my "real" work without much issues.
I used a Win 3.11 for testing and customer issues... bleep, reboot, bleep, reboot, etc

Then came Win95 .. to much blue.. way to much blue.. 2 hours of uptime was considered very good. It was worse then 3.11

on the other hand... I ran WinNT 3.51 and later same 3.51 with the 95-shell (later to turn into NT 4.0) and that was steady as a rock.

thoughts ? hum... MacOS 7.5 used less resources, was not pre-emp but easily lasted a day without issues... WinNT demanded huge resources (for the time) but was pretty good.
At home I had Amiga OS 2.0 ... very few resources, pre-emp, and for my use very stable

Side note: only last week I was fooling around with a 486 laptop and win95 to play with parrallel port interfacing... and decided to junk it in favour of a USB Bit Wacker board :p

Then came Win95 .. to much blue.. way to much blue.. 2 hours of uptime was considered very good. It was worse then 3.11

I didn't have any major stability issues with Win95. Sure, it wasn't as stable as Win2k, but it was a lot more stable than Win3.1.

I honestly couldn't tell you how often it crashed, but it damn sure wasn't every 2 years. More like once a week, assuming it were a really bad week. If it crashed more than once every couple of days, you either had bad hardware/drivers, or you were doing something really dumb ...

Fast forward to 2010. I've been running Win7 for a couple of months, and it hasn't crashed yet

Then came Win95 .. to much blue.. way to much blue.. 2 hours of uptime was considered very good.

Yes yes oh hell yeah. How much precious time was wasted, work and ideas destroyed, bad emotions spawned - on a global scale. What a suffering computers have been back than. The inherent insecurity of windows's handling of privileges (which paved the way for today's virii, trojan and malware plague), chaotic operating system structure, buggy broken code and the curse of binary compatibility are things the world would better have been off without.

However, the BILLIONS Mr. Gates extracted selling low-quality software are now being used in the fight against poverty, on a grand scale. And indeed, a computer on every desktop has become reality. So yes, Windows 95 changed the world indeed, bringing computing to the masses. The good, the bad - and the ugly.
Happy fscking Birthday 95.

How can you say Windows 95 is 15 today when it's been dead for so long? No one uses it, it's not supported, you cannot buy it.

It is software and I would bet that your shiny Windows 7 still uses a lot of code from Windows 95; its Win32 API is still the same (with a lot of evolution, of course); its command line still supports "dir", "copy" or "del", etc.

So, though Win95 as product is dead a lot of time ago, its bits are still there, powering 9 of each 10 computers in the world.

The company I work at has industrial machines which were produced about 13 years ago, by companies no longer in business.

Guess what the last OS these machines can interface with was?

You guessed it. Windows 95 with 16-bit drivers.

Until we replace the (very very expensive) machines, it'll be cheaper to limp win95 along -- even if that does mean running it in VMware on a newer hunk of hardware... which yes, has happened in a few cases.

I was fourteen when Windows 95 came out. I remember being unhappy with the user interface changes, and preferred Windows 3.1. By the time I got used to it, I was unhappy with how unstable it was. I started using Linux in 2000.

I wish every Windows user had to read that blog post. More people than you would think will even trash their computer and buy a new one if they get a virus. The first myth is the most annoying. If I had to guess, I'd say that 90% of Windows users believe that.

I wish every Windows user had to read that blog post. More people than you would think will even trash their computer and buy a new one if they get a virus. The first myth is the most annoying. If I had to guess, I'd say that 90% of Windows users believe that. "
Only 90%? That sounds generous. I would actually expect the number of clueless Windows users to be higher than that... 95% at least, and likely higher... most Windows users barely even know how a computer works, let alone the operating system they run.

But yay, happy birthday Windows 95. Congrats for creating a shitload of clueless drones who should not even be able to access a computer at their skill level. But Windows 95 made that possible.

I think I bought my Amiga 1200 less than 1500F, that is about €200, something like $250 ... in 1992!
I believe the price has gone up, not down. The hardware has improved but it took about a decade before the PC match the Amiga after its death.

Because by the time Microsoft were heralding the coming of “Multi-Media” with Windows 3.1, Amigas were already being used for video editing and digital screen effects for years already, at a fraction of the cost.

I wasn't talking about Amiga's, I was talking about x86 machines. Macs and Wintels back in the day were expensive.

I bought my Vic 20 for about 200 bucks, but who cares about that?

Macs were not x86 machines back then. They used Motorola pocessors from 68000 to 68060, like the Amiga. The Amiga was still competitive, although it's not the right term because there was no competition. Actually the Amiga was massively superior to Macs and PCs in 1995 and still costed less (an order of magnitude less). Your Vic 20 was not competitive at all in 1995. I mentioned the Amiga because you said that prices droped because of Windows. Actually it took about a decade to recover Windows' damage and get something that could compete with the Amiga on price and functions.

What killed the Amiga was not specifically Windows, it was Office. Windows sucked big time when compared to AmigaOS but there was nothing half as good as Office. Office only supported Windows and MacOS. It was the killer app that killed the Amiga. If Apple is still alive today, it is because Microsoft Office ran on MacOS.

mac people used to say that, too. photoshop was still the mac killerapp, but the market was small compared to office. audio/midi was being matched on win9x but was too small. multimedia was tiny and tortuous. if news reports were correct, apple was so close to dying that any app sales that helped was critical.

That's a good one - funny how some things don't change. Some (using the term loosely) would still be better off with a typewriter and ledger sheet / calculator. Wonder how much time is wasted today in business on making some useless memo pretty or hosing a system after surfing the net.

I preferred Windows 3.1. I liked running DOS with an optional GUI - very similar to what I have in Linux today. For speed, I booted straight to the DOS prompt. When I needed to run a Windows app, I started it up in Windows. When I was done, I was back to the command line.

I think the fusion of the DOS and the GUI that happened in Windows 95 was a huge mistake. Instead, DOS should have morphed, supported long-filenames, FAT32, etc. The GUI should have stayed a separate component.

In a way, Ubuntu and others are marching in this same direction. They want you to boot straight into the GUI. They disable the CTL-ALT-BACKSPACE combination. There is too much of an effort to be like Mac and Windows. Bummer, I'm old!

Wow I feel really old, I remember Windows 95 came out when I was in 7th grade. My family upgraded our Windows 3.11 Packard Bell 650cd which had an Intel 486sx2 50Mhz processor with 16MB of RAM to Windows 95. Though Windows 95 wasn't perfect, IMHO it was a heck of lot better than Windows 3.11.

The Packard Bell couldn't be upgraded to Windows 98( the 486sx2 lacked a math co-processor), but I was able to give it the Windows 98 look and feel by installing Internet Explorer 4 with Active Desktop. Ah good times.

LOL. You must have had a later version, cause I remember mine only had 11 disks.

I was a broke student at the time, and I actually went in thirds with two of my mates to buy it.

I remember my 386DX40 (Oh baby) PC only had 4Mb of RAM at the time, and Win95 would condescendingly advise me every time I turned the machine on that: "You might want to install more RAM". Sure Windows but whose going to pay for it huh?

I used Windows 95 back when I was about 15 years old and I'll be honest, I never liked it, I had learned how to get my work done in dos or 3.11. It would always crash right when I was in the middle of a research paper or some type of homework for school, and usually about 3 seconds before I was going to save me work. I think possibly with the exception of ME, 95 was the most unstable operating system Microsoft ever made.

On a side note, although it annoys the hell out of me to use Windows 7 (I'm a mac/linux guy), it is rock solid stable for me and I am slowly getting used to it.

Some people mention Apple and OS/2 wrap and nobody mentioned Amiga OS?
I had an Amiga 1200 at the time. When Microsoft mentioned multitasking in adverts, it was like WTF? for me. The AmigaOS was still massively superior in every ways.

Some people mention Apple and OS/2 wrap and nobody mentioned Amiga OS?
I had an Amiga 1200 at the time. When Microsoft mentioned multitasking in adverts, it was like WTF? for me. The AmigaOS was still massively superior in every ways.

I did mention it Used Amiga OS at home until I switched to NT 4.0 on a p166... no earlier Windows version could have forced me though MacOS 7.x at work was very stable/satisfying for my actual day-to-day work.

I must be one of the few who remembers Windows 95 in a positive light. I migrated from the Amiga to the PC in about 1992 and hated Windows 3.1, it was such a backwards step.

When Windows 95 launched it was a breath of fresh air, it made the GUI a first class item on the PC. I think because they were afraid to copy the Mac, they came up with new UI elements that worked very well, the overall shell was excellent at the time.

I had the Chicago beta at first which seemed to be like the new GUI plastered on top of Win 3.1, it was a bit flaky, but the final version was "good enough" on reliability in my experience.

I have an old laptop I adore that I still run windows 95 on. It has never crashed, believe it or not. Its a NEC Versa P/75 with a Pentium 75mhz cpu, 40mb ram, 350mb IBM hdd, 4gb CF card in a pcmcia slot with an adapter, ORiNOCO Silver PCMCIA WiFi card, 800x600 display @ 256 colors. Its great. I run OffByOne Web Browser on it, an AIM client, IRC client, Notepad+ (not Notepad++), PuTTY, an MP3 player, all at once and it hums along just dandy.

used mac system 7.6 in win98 days. both seemed equal. At home, win95 (fat32 version). seemed good. all 3 would sometimes suddenly crash apps.
my impression is that only os/2 had claim of superiority, but wasn't its ui crippled by being overly win3-ish? I've never even seen os/2 other than as the famous de Bergerac-ish and kioskish atm os